The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

#46

I would like to rec Eryi's Action. A very fun Mario-clone known for its fairness and player-friendly gamedesign.

#47

Treasure Mountain. The 1995 version.

Applesintime · #48

can't believe nobody has said this one yet but

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

Spindarene · #49

Death Stranding

I've heard it's good, but I will probably never have a computer powerful enough to play it.

almostinhuman · #50

Year Walk

#51

Super Mario Bros. (1993):

Directed by: Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton
Original Placement: 3/6
Watched Before? Yes.

God I can’t even tell whether this was even, like, meant to be a Mario movie or a random script refitted to function as a Mario movie. Allegedly this was meant to be seen as an origin story for the Mario Bros — showing the beginnings of all the characters and how they came to be the way they are in the games — and… having seen the more recent (and more Miyamoto-controlled) Mario movie and seeing the similarities between both premises, I’m inclined to believe that, but god all the ways it really tries to convince you it was always a Mario movie is hilarious, from the constant requirements in the plot for the Mario Bros. to be plumbers, the random references all throughout, and the way the movie insists on providing an origin point for totally minor things you never would have wondered about. My impression is that it is intended a Mario movie, for sure, but maybe one where the non-Miyamoto producers futzed with it with the aim of making it more quote-unquote marketable. Or maybe they did just take a script that wouldn’t have sold otherwise and copy-pasted Mario references over it. Who knows?

Either way… even beyond the inherent humour in how much this movie really doesn’t feel like an adaptation of Mario, it’s still a fun time — for both legitimate and less legitimate reasons. There’s an interesting aesthetic going on in the production design of the Mushroom Kingdom, and you can kind of see the dystopic vibes in how, like, industrial, crowded, yet brightly lit everything is. It’s too dark and grungey for a Mario movie — especially how the koopas seem to… just be dinosaurs in the name of realism — but I won’t lie this would be a vibe I’d be interested in seeing in another movie. There’s this weird pro-left political commentary underlining everything, from the way the movie lambasts the prison system when the Mario Bros. get put into police detention to how evil minions Larry and Spike, the moment they’re made smarter they immediately abandon the monarchy and join the heroes in their quest to topple it. The script is… cheesy as hell, which comes at odds given how most of the actors here are used to more dramatic roles, and it really helps contribute to the fun when all these lines and concepts are being delivered completely seriously. It’s great.

Aside from that… it does mostly feel like your average kid’s movie. It kind of follows the same beats I’ve seen in a lot of movies of the time and… doesn’t do them particularly out of the ordinary. It seems fairly competent, and is elevated by all the things mentioned above, but at the same time… it also veers too long for my tastes — as interesting as the aesthetic is there’s only so much I can really take sludgy brown and drab cityscapes before it starts grating on me. And while it is a fun experience… a good amount of it is more at the movie’s expense, between the absolutely insane script and how much it kind of messes with the source material. If it weren’t given the name Super Mario Bros, that’d probably be considered a fairly competent, if not particularly remarkable kids movie that… still probably would’ve lost the studio money. As is, though… man, what a time. 5/10.

(Mario) The Music Box (2015):

Developed by: Team Ari
Nominated by: RetroVenus
Original Position: 24/28
Played Before? No.

Before having actually played Mario: The Music Box, most of what I knew was that it was a fairly standard RPG Maker horror game… which made the strange decision of starring the Super Mario Bros, of all people. Having now been able to play it myself, I have to say… yeah what an absolutely baffling choice. Like, way to just completely undercut the serious horror tone you’re going for. It’s hard to take the descriptions of all your gruesome fates so seriously when the main character is making Mario noises as he gets impaled through the throat. It’s hard to really read the interactions between you and the very edgy and serious original characters the way the developer intended when they’re anime OCs and Mario is precisely half their size. Maybe if it leaned into the premise a little and treated it in more of a… black comedy sort of way (watch Mario die over and over and over and over-) but as it stands it’s… caught in a little bit of a catch-22: Mario being the main character undercuts everything the tone is going for, but were Mario not in this game at all… there wouldn’t really be much notable about this, honestly.

The plot follows Mario, of the Super Mario Bros as he investigates an abandoned house on the edges of the Mushroom Kingdom. Upon finding a mysterious music box, Mario soon finds zombie ghosts converging in on him, and he now cannot leave this place. Now he, Luigi, and The Third Mario Brother Byakuya Togami a stranger named Riba must find a way through the horrors of the house, with danger lurking along every corner the game explicitly warns you not to go down. Amidst it, one particular entity places its sight on Mario, and what follows is a conflict: one for Mario’s body, and one for Mario’s sanity………………………………………………………..

I’ll give this game credit: there’s an insane amount of effort put into it. That’s not a “you tried” sort of thing: the production value in this game is insane. Every story event, ending, and death has multiple hand-illustrated CGs visually depicting whatever’s happening. There are precisely 559 of these — multiple for each event — and they do a lot to show what’s happening, beyond the limits of what you can do with RPGmaker (unless you’re really good at sprite animation) and helping make each death feel, theoretically, that much more impactful. The sprite art, both for the characters and the general environment, is fairly aesthetically pleasing, even if the low saturation made seeing certain things sort of a pain. There are also, like, just straight-up custom animations made in the same style as the CG, both for… a Kingdom Hearts or When They Cry-esque opening video and also for a fully stylized RPG boss fight in one of the endings. Even with games such as Ib or The Witch’s House, most of what they had was limited to pixel art and ways to play around RPGMaker limitations. This… goes on a whole different level in terms of production value, and you can really tell that this game was made by an artist.

…You can also tell, however, that this game wasn’t made by a writer. This goes beyond the whole “story expects to be taken deathly seriously while also starring Mario” thing. For as much as the art works to make the many deaths you suffer feel evocative, the writing… does the opposite. Characters just matter-of-factly describe the way they die, and the sameyness (and also clunkiness) of these descriptions does a lot to undercut how varied and sometimes visceral these death sequences can be. Maybe if they were shorter, and leaned towards the visuals rather than the written, then they’d be more effective, but as stands most of them felt drawn out and kinda clunky. The plot, too, for as seriously it takes itself, has… issues. There’s a lot of characters (and also through this a lot of characters who just… drop out of the narrative) a lot of re-explanations of things the game forgot it already told the player, and a lot of cases where… the narrative doesn’t really have the effect it’s intending. Like, yes, this person who murdered their entire extended family because she wanted to be immortal like her boyfriend sure is actually a sympathetic victim of society. The titular music box… sure does matter a lot in the story. Ultimately, like, yes, it is incredibly silly that this story stars the Mario Brothers… but even if that wasn't there to undercut everything I really don't think this plot and story would be able to stand on its own.

And game-design wise… it’s no Ib or Witch’s House. The area design… leans linear, but areas are large enough that at points it’s easy to get lost on what you’re meant to do next. Puzzles… are mostly the sort of bread and butter “put a key in this keyhole to put a key into another keyhole-” that… doesn’t really feel all that unique or fun to play out — honestly, most of the puzzles I saw here were already things I’d seen in other games. Deaths are… very telegraphed: rather than the sudden, brutal ends you’d receive even if you thought you were going the right way, you’re kind of blatantly suggested that you shouldn’t go down this path and if you do then you get an overtly prolonged description as to why the obvious mistake was, in fact, a mistake. They’re also a little samey in that regard: literally every time you deal with a possessed person the answer is to violence the ghost out of them. Every time you're given the option to try to jump — y'know, like Mario is oft to do — it fails and you die. In terms of RPGMaker horror games it’s on the less ingenious end, and that could be fine… but I think the specific horror gameplay tropes they lean into are kind of the more irritating ones to deal with.

And in the end, when… a lot of the individual elements don’t really hold under scrutiny, and the only thing that particularly stands out in the first place is the strange decision to use Mario as the main protagonist, it’s easy to tell how this game has the little bit of infamy it has. And while there would be a way to make these particular ideas work, here… they don’t. Not in the way the developer intended. 4/10.

Toilet In Wonderland (2010):

Developed by: like, 100 people
Original Position: 12/29
Played Before? No.

Toilet in Wonderland is a game where the heroine has severe constipation. One day, when you try to go poopie, you awaken to find yourself in a strange world where nothing seems quite normal. You are visited by MJ, who tells you your purpose: this is a world born when you started your poop, and only by releasing the poop from your tushie can you free yourself. You must now explore the corners of the world, gather up a party, and search for six mystical toilets, all in the name of freeing yourself — both from this wonderland, and from your severe constipation.

This game is wild. It was made by, like, 100 different devs as part of a con, and while you can see the different visions create vastly different events, it's all in service of the… incredibly surreal, shitposty (that's not a pun this game's about constipation you are literally not shitting) tone. The game doesn’t operate by any sort of rules or sense — and anything can happen around any corner. That’s not to say that there’s no consistency, or it’s just a game where weird stuff happens — there’s a sense of cause and effect, and jokes you thought were one-and-done can sometimes sneak back up when you don’t expect it. I also love the way the graphics kind of contribute to it: the majority of it is store-bought RPGMaker assets… but then out of nowhere you'll also just see these crudely hand-drawn pictures or ripped photos of real people. It's inconsistent, in a way that catches you off guard, but also in a way that really helps contribute to the specific vibe the game's going for.

And honestly, like… there’s not, particularly much more I can say than that? This is the kind of thing where I can’t really go into specifics without ruining the experience. I’d say that maybe I could’ve used some indication of where items/doors were things I could actually interact with, but aside from that… it’s a free, quick game that does a lot with a little, and handles its out-there vibes so well. 7/10.

Shaun of the Dead (2004):

Directed by: Edgar Wright
Original Placement: 2/7
Watched Before? Yes.

There’s not a lot that can be said about Shaun of the Dead that hasn’t been said already: how well it equates the zombie genre to contemporary life, how every off-handed remark early one comes back later in some shape or form, and how for a movie that on the surface seems to be a parody of the zombie genre… the movie takes itself rather seriously, with quite a lot of moments of emotional pathos. To me… I honestly wouldn’t even call it that much of a parody — a comedy, absolutely, but beyond just featuring zombies and a couple of offhanded references there’s a… fairly genuine and straightforward story here all the way through, which I think is its strongest aspect. There are some things that knock it down for me — one major character just kind of dips out of the movie before the climax, and compared to some of Edgar Wright’s later script this one… does feel less subtle in regards to having things appear just to be brought up later, but aside from those… yeah, this movie’s still excellent. Funny, insightful, and so much more than it initially seems. 9/10.

And next up is...

#52

Alisa (2021):

Developed by: Caspar Croes
Nominated by: Jilly
Original Position: 17/31
Played Before? No.

I’ve mentioned before how throwbacks to retro horror — usually the early survival horror era of tank controls and fixed camera angles — often take the limitations or design elements and crank them up way rougher than they ever felt in their inspirations. Having played a lot more of the survival horror canon now… it’s a case where while there’s basis in these sorts of things being in the originators it feels way exaggerated, in a way that feels considerably worse to play when oftentimes the inspiration was rather simple in application. Like, there’s ‘you can only save with a specific item you must collect,’ and then there’s ‘you can only save at the shop using the in-game currency, which you can only get from killing enemies, but also this in-game currency is also used to get better weapons and medkits and ammo.’ Not to mention things such as mazes or stealth sections that… weren’t really in these old survival horror games and don’t mesh with their constraints (fixed camera, tank controls) at all. There’s credit where credit is due where impersonating the aesthetic of these old games is concerned — especially in Alisa’s case, given it allegedly can be played on period-accurate hardware — but frequently it’s the gameplay itself that betrays that it’s… not a perfect recreation, and in Alisa’s case is what primarily lets it down.

You play as the titular Alisa, a military officer in some western-European country around the 1920s. While chasing down a spy for the “blue prints” they’ve stolen, Alisa finds herself beset by doll-like creatures and taken to a mysterious mansion — one she is trapped inside, and one where everything is out to get her. With nothing on her except what she can scavenge, Alisa must enter the survival horror: explore the mysterious mansion and all its many areas, fight all its denizens, and hopefully uncover its mysteries and find a way out before it’s too late.

I think my favourite thing about this game is how it captures its aesthetic, both in graphical design and gameplay. The game nails the low-poly look of its inspirations, but not in a way that shoots itself in the foot: there’s enough of an eye towards both the graphical artstyle and the cinematography of the fixed-camera-angle that most locations you go through look rather distinct and striking. I’m especially into the gothic horror overtones: it’s a vibe I… haven’t really seen before in survival horror games like these, and I really love the way things such as dollhouses, puppets, and clockwork interweave through the mansion and provide a consistent throughline, even despite how hard each area can vary in look. I also like how this manages to extend into enemy design: there are a ton of different foes you brush up against throughout the game, and in addition to them all looking unique and varied they function as such as well — movesets and movements and special mechanics that make each fight (or flight) different than the one before. I’m a fan of when a nice artstyle manages to stretch into and improve other areas of the game, and here in particular I’m really into how the aesthetic makes each area feel distinct and different to play, in a way that then feeds into the survival horror: you solve puzzles and fight enemies to access new areas of the house, but you don’t quite know what you’re going to see until it’s right in front of you.

I was also super down for some of the ways the game iterates on the PS1-survival horror formula. While you’re still capable of finding supplies such as ammo or medkits through scavenging the mansion, most of what you get comes from a shop you find early on, the currency for which you get… coming exclusively from killing enemies. This introduces a new element of resource management, and works well as a sort of double-edged sword. Unlike, say, the first Resident Evil (or at least the remake) where the threat of resource drain or Crimsonheads encouraged you against fighting enemies, here it becomes a choice: do you want to get that shiny new weapon/want to try and save and find yourself too short on what you need to get it? What enemies are still around? Do you reckon you can kill one efficiently enough to actually get a return on your investment? This all adds a new layer to gameplay, and pairs really well with how varied enemies are. I’m also a fan of some of the other things you can buy in the shop, even if during my run I was often too poor to take advantage of them. Getting your pick of reward after killing a boss is a neat choice for the player, given that what they don’t pick is lost forever for that playthrough. Modifications seem neat — and even if I’m not generally a fan of “you can’t use these cool things if you want the good ending,” I like how it ties in lore-wise. Dresses are fun cosmetics, and the additional effects they give Alisa allow the player to finetune their stats to their playstyle. The shop, and the mechanics regarding money in general were a really cool addition to this type of game, both in terms of the mechanics surrounding them on their own and the additional cool things the shop gives the player access to.

Other iterations, however… fare less well. While the shop, in general, does a lot of cool things with the PS1 survival horror formula, some of the other things mostly just… don’t mesh and are super annoying to play around. It’s oftentimes a case where… the game will stop what it’s doing to become something else but that something else… really does not work well in a game such as this. There’s one part of the game which is flat-out a stealth section — one which comes down to “run to these specific points at this specific time or face instant death,” one which… has no room for experimentation or doing it faster than the game wants you to, and due to the fixed camera angles often results in you being unable to see where the things you’re meant to stealth past… even if the player character themselves wouldn’t have that problem. Right after this is a boss fight, which I’d prepared and stocked my items up for... only to find out that actually this specific boss was actually a rather clunky rail shooter, where you can’t heal, can only barely dodge certain attacks, and one where ‘aim’ and ‘move’ are bound to the same keys, which rather than seeming like a fair challenge just feels really annoying to deal with, where whatever skill you’ve picked up through playing the game is moved to the wayside in favour of trying to figure out this brand new style of play the game has just thrown on you.

Combat… also becomes rough once you start finding more advanced enemies. Some mechanics get attached to enemies, and while sometimes it works and makes them fairly fun to play around sometimes it… doesn’t. There are these mermen skeleton enemies which have a dismemberment mechanic — where depending on where you aim you might just knock off one of their limbs and make them angry — but in practice, it’s not really possible to know what body part the game thinks you’re aiming at, so it ends up with you accidentally knocking off their hand or head rather than killing them… after which they immediately just hitstun you to death because hitstun on the player is majorly jank. There are so many points where you’ll get hit, knocked down… and then you’ll lose much more HP because the enemy will attack you and knock you down again literally the moment you get up. Your best strategy, particularly against bosses or tougher enemies, is to kite them, which… works way too well for its own good. Enemies generally move at the same speed the player does, rather than faster or slower, which can result in loooooong stretches of you and the enemy walking around each other, the fight not progressing because neither of you are in range to actually try to attack. I literally beat one boss because all of their attacks could be easily dodged by… just walking backwards around the arena. It’d be easy to brush off this jank as trying to be accurate to the old survival horrors of yore, or stating that the frustrating/sloggy parts as making the game feel more stressful or tense… but it feels at odds with itself. In, say, Resident Evil or Silent Hill (where fighting felt way more smooth regardless), combat was often a last resort if you couldn’t run from a situation, and added to the tension due to providing consequences, either in the short term (resource drain) or the long term (killing the enemy resulting in something worse taking its place later). Here, the shop system encourages you to try your hand fighting enemies… which then works against itself given how combat oftentimes doesn’t stand out for the better.

Which is a shame, because initially I was super vibing with this game, and even when things started to get annoying later I was still really into the parts that won me over at the beginning of the game. Regardless of its issues, I was still really into a lot of the things it brought to the table, and I still really like the dollhouse, gothic horror puppetry aesthetic. It’s just a shame that I started to notice the strings after a while, and got to see just how many knots were tangling the experience up. 6/10.

#53

Paratopic (2018):

Developed by: Arbitrary Metric
Nominated by: Methodical Slacker
Original Position: 28/32
Played Before? Yes!

I played Paratopic roughly, like, 4-5 years before this, and the impression I had then was that there were interesting ideas hamstrung by just how… confusing and padded it was for what was only a forty-minute game. Now, replaying it 4-5 years later… my opinion hasn’t changed much. I credit it for its general artstyle and sound design (I love how grimy everything is), but… yeah I wasn’t really into much else. The conceit of the revolving protagonists is interesting, but for some reason the game actively tries to mislead you into thinking that it's just the one, and it's difficult to really tell that that's what the game's going for until near the end. Meanwhile… I can’t emphasize how padded this feels for what’s already not a long game. There are no less than three sections where you drive down an empty highway for five minutes, and when it's not doing that it's either making you walk slowly through a forest, wait for the world's slowest elevator to come down, or something else that doesn't really do much more than drag the game's runtime out. Nothing of substance really happens, and it feels like in the middle of giving the game its atmosphere the idea of attaching something more to it became second or third or fifth priority. And, admittedly, it’s a neat atmosphere… but ultimately, without much of a coherent narrative or defining idea for said atmosphere to support, this game feels… kind of vapid, more than anything. 3/10.

Introvert: A Teenager Simulator (2021):

Developed by: Euphoric Brothers
Original Position: 31/33
Played Before? No.

Man, I was legitimately interested in this game. It came up on new and trending on Steam back in 2021 and I saw the blurb and the artstyle and I was immediately like ‘okay, yeah, I’m sold, I’ll play this at some point’ and then that point finally came and… God what the fuck even was this? It’s allegedly a game that talks about Serious Issues such as mental health and school shootings but it’s treated like a giant shitpost? And, like, yeah, I know that’s Gen Z humour, but as someone who’s part of Gen Z and who’s invested in both of these topics… having a guest speaker suddenly repeat “my ass itches” super bass boosted for twenty seconds while everybody in the room t-poses does not make me think you’re taking these subjects seriously, my dude. Even beyond that, the writing isn’t great. Everything feels so hamfisted and not like a real teacher or student. The game tries to show how isolation and bullying can affect people but can’t figure out how to actually do that without giving the player multiple choices where both options are just “participate in this dude’s bullying.” The game seems to think that being mute makes you unable to communicate at all and it's mostly just an excuse for the main character to stand there, silently, to try and show a message about how staying silent in the face of bullying only perpetuates it. Characters appear and talk to you and loosely seem like they're important and then they just disappear from the script and never get mentioned again. There’s also just… a werewolf? For some reason? And you and the werewolf just go flying through the sky like it’s Robot Unicorn? Whatever... it was trying to go for with that whole thing kind of lost me immediately. I’m still into the… low-fi, minimalist pixel art (even if it’s bathed in visual filters that are all painful to look at), and I can… loosely tell that the developer Tried and does care about these topics, but God, for something I was unironically interested in before I played it… fucking hell what a letdown. 2/10.

The Dread X Collection (2020):

Developed by: Dread XP
Original Position: Nooooot gonna rank any of these compared to all the other games.
Played Before? I've seen playthroughs of some of these but otherwise no.

The Dread X Collection is… a hybrid game/game jam which asked one thing of ten different indie horror developers: distill the core idea for the horror game of their dreams into a playable teaser. To that end, the prompt was executed in a variety of ways: some of the games in the pack beg the question of how they could even be extended further given how complete they feel as standalone experiences, while others… definitely feel more like a proof of concept than something capable of working on its own. It’s a sort of smorgasbord of different ideas and executions, and the quality can vary wildly between each game in the pack, which… as someone who loves horror, and new ideas, and analyzing what works and what doesn’t, this is my shit.

So here are my thoughts on each game, organized by the order in which I played them. There’s a little ranking at the end in case you’re interested in where I put each game relative to each other but without any further ado:

The Pay Is Nice
I like some of the stuff going on here — I’m into the theming around what we’ll excuse or stomach if it’s part of our job, and I love the diegetic representation of the fixed camera angles as security cameras watching and automating your every move — but the writing is… not quite there, and sadly there’s a glitch where there’s no animation for walking backwards so I ended up just zooming everywhere through the facility which kind of undercut a lot of what the game was trying to build up. I could definitely see this working a bit more if it was longer (diegetically represent the daily grind by making you do the same thing over and over again, maybe), but as is… it’s a bit hamfisted and abrupt to really work, IMO.

Don’t Go Out
This honestly has a ton of potential as a (theoretically) full game. I love the idea of a horror/slasher-themed deckbuilder/roguelike/RPG thing, and I’m into a lot of the mechanics here — how you need slowly-fading torchlight to see through the fog of war, how the arena becomes smaller with each turn, the focus on using the cards you get to just try and survive rather than clear an objective or win… I’d be super down for this to be expanded on. Right now though… there isn’t particularly much here — it’s precisely one level, where the only difference between easy victory and near unavoidable defeat is… whether the player is able to find a specific door while in complete darkness, which… doesn’t provide a particularly engaging experience. I absolutely see the potential in this and really hope this gets made into something full, but the playable teaser in itself does… not have a lot to it.

Hand of Doom
This was pretty cool. This is a throwback to some of the old early dungeon crawler games (honestly reminiscent of Virtual Hydlide, at least in terms of how it looks), complete with a menu that takes up two-thirds of the screen and a… rather fun magic system where you have to press buttons to physically chant out each spell. Getting new spells — and using them to progress forward — is one of the coolest things about this game, and even if it is a bit simplistic and more of a demo/proof-of-concept than a game of its own I still had a ton of fun with it. Super happy that this one in particular got expanded into a full experience. The 20-30 minutes of it I played really delivered in selling me on the concept.

SUMMER NIGHT
Frankly, I’m… not particularly sure how this could even be seen as the start of something larger, given how complete of an experience it feels on its own. The game does build up fairly well, starting off as a really accurate game-and-watch throwback which is fairly fun in its own right, and as the game progresses, so too do things stop being quite what they seem, in a way that interfaces rather well with how the game adds new mechanics to up the ante. I’d knock it down a bit mostly due to how there are… so many periods where you’re just waiting for the game to continue — I guess it’s meant to make the player more unsettled, but it felt more like dead air than anything — but aside from that this was a super solid standalone experience. Easily the highlight of the pack.

OUTSIDERS
This one… I might have been a bit too fatigued to really appreciate it while I was playing it. It’s… almost like a survival horror roguelike, in a way. You have to scour empty, unfamiliar house to find items (primarily keys) that let you solve puzzles, which all coalesce to perhaps let you out… except, secretly, there’s a time limit, and when your stumbling around the house not quite knowing what to do leads you to run out of time, you’re forced to start over again… but with all the items in different spots. I won’t reveal anything after this point, but… as a whole it’s a really interesting take to make a time-attack survival horror, and I like the way the mechanics are justified thematically. I doooo however think that maybe the puzzling itself is a little weak: it’s mostly just “find item unlock way with item” puzzles, where most of the ultimate challenge ending up being having to find the keys you need in the hundreds of drawers within the house, something not helped by how the time limit slowly makes it impossible to actually see anything as all the lights around you get snuffed out. Still, I’m definitely intrigued by the main idea here, and definitely would be interested in seeing it expanded on, even if I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of this particular demo. Also I SAW THOSE HQ_RESIDENTIAL_HOUSE ASSETS, YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME.

MR. BUCKET TOLD ME TO
This one is a survival sim — one of the ones where you have to scavenge to keep your food and water and piss and shit and etc. meters up to keep yourself alive — and while it’s a bit simplistic by virtue of being a game jam game the core mechanic where each day you have to choose which of your tools to give up forever adds an interesting edge to it. I say ‘interesting’ because in practise it’s kind of like Don’t Go Out where you kind of have to know the specific answer or else you’re doomed to fail, but as a preview for a potential something larger I’m into what it’s going for: taking the way resource management works in these sorts of survival sims, and then through forcing you to get rid of your tools and scour the island for far less useful ways of feeding/hydrating/cleaning yourself slowly make it clear that this is more survival horror. Definitely think that if this goes in a little deeper on its mechanics and also gives the player a bit more of a setup/indication of how things work (I played this game twice in total and had no idea some things were in there until near the end of my second) I could definitely vibe with this as a full experience.

ROTGUT
oh boy I do love walking down an empty tunnel for 15 minutes while absolutely nothing happens- wait what do you mean I have to walk the exact same distance back to the start- wait what do you mean the game glitched out and didn’t give me any ending

THE PONY FACTORY
This was a fun little boomer shooter. The short of the game is that you’re travelling through this abandoned factory for something that lies at the center of it, fighting creatures called “ponies” along the way, and… for the most part it works in how simple it is. I like the fact that you can’t carry your gun and your flashlight at the same time, forcing you into a situation where either you can see enemies but can’t fight back or you can fight back but can’t see them. I’m also into the level design — how conductive it is to surprise encounters, and how it changes up once you collect the something and you start going through the levels backwards to get out. I think the difficulty’s tuned up a bit high — and I’m pretty sure switching down to an easier mode did nothing — but aside from that it was a neat way to spend ~30 minutes. Dunno how this would expand into a more “full” experience but I’d be down to see it.

SHATTER
I love the vibes in this one, both in how it wears the PSX throwback graphical style (I love this one’s use of colours in particular, I feel like you never get to see lush greens and pinks in a game like this) and how much it evokes the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopia it’s trying to be. In terms of being a teaser, it feels more like one to set up a world rather than to set up a game, and to that end it worked — I liked walking around and seeing and learning about where exactly I was. I… wasn’t particularly a fan of how restrictive and annoying the stamina bar is — for something that’s ostensibly a walking simulator most of the runtime, forcing you to walk super slow unless you get a secret upgrade just made going around everywhere much more of a chore than it had to be — but… yeah, I’m sold. Really wanna see what a bigger version of this is like.

CARTHANC
This one’s sad because for as much production value is here and for how good the vibe is this felt more annoying to play than anything. I love the artstyle of, like, this alien temple that takes the aesthetic of ancient Egypt but adds a futuristic spin on it but the core of this is like, a first-person platformer — and not one that plays particularly well. The use of first-person makes your perspective rather limited in a way that makes platforming frustrating, since it’s hard to really gauge how good your jump is or where you are on a platform — I failed so many times because I’d accidentally walked off a platform before I jumped or because I was standing on something dangerous and didn’t know it. Combined with enemies who… basically scream in your ears constantly while they spawncamp you, and a lack of an idea on what the player is supposed to do at any point and… yeah. Like the idea, like how it looks, but god did this one feel so frustrating to play.

Summer Night > Hand of Doom > Shatter > The Pony Factory > Mr. Bucket Told Me To > Outsiders > Don’t Go Out > Carthanc > The Pay Is Nice > Rotgut

The Typical Nightmare (2018):

Developed by: ELECTROSTALIN ENTERTAINMENT
Original Position: 31/34
Played Before? I've seen a playthrough, but otherwise no.

I can’t quite tell whether this game was in on its own joke or not. There are parts that indicate that it is poking fun at itself, though even then I’m… not really sure that really compensates for how buggy and broken it feels to interact with anything in this game. Beyond that, too, it’s not particularly fun: it’s a walking simulator where it’s constantly really unclear where you’re supposed to go or how you’re supposed to solve the… puzzles? the game throws at you. That said, though, it’s comedy gold. From the voice acting which is just an absolute delight (real “12 year old wants to be a serious voice actor but also doesn’t want to wake up his mom” vibes) to how the idea of endless torment seems to be… being teleported to different, identical apartment buildings and forced to climb up stairs endlessly, and when they’re not directly making the game worse to play shoddy animation and graphical glitches are a sight to behold. It’s kind of the perfect game to riff on and show to other people, even if… actually playing it is a bit more painful of an experience. 2/10.

FAITH: Chapter II (2019):

Developed by: Airdorf
Original Position: 12/35
Played Before? No.

Faith: Chapter II works both to expand on what worked in the original game while also helping to fix some of its issues. The most notable thing, I feel, is the increase of this game’s scope — multiple large and distinct areas that all feel fresh compared to each other and never make the game wear out its welcome, even given how much longer it is than the first FAITH. The map as a whole has also been tightened — sending the player through gated paths and corridors as opposed to the rather large and open forest and house of the previous game, making it so that while sometimes I could see a puzzle and be all like ????????????? it was never a question of where I was meant to go. The strengths of the original are still here, too: the artstyle/retro aesthetic is still fantastic, and the game strikes the balance of emulating its inspirations while not going way too far with them. I knock it down a bit mostly… due to some plot stuff — for the second part of a trilogy it really doesn’t particularly go anywhere, aside from introducing some new characters — and because the enemy encounters here felt samey/not as unique as what came before (and what’s to come in chapter III), but all in all I’d consider this a step up: it keeps what made its predecessor fun and unique and yet expands in ways that make it feel brand new. 7/10.

Lily's Well (2022):

Developed by: PureIceBlue
Original Position: 11/36
Played Before? No.

I’ve often felt with horror games structured like this — where you must go through all of the bad endings before you’re able to get the ‘true ending’ — often reached a point where you were better off just watching a YouTube playthrough than going through it, as oftentimes the brief bits of new content weren’t really worth trudging through all the other stuff you’d seen in all the playthroughs before. This game… actually wears that aspect mostly well — both because loops are only, like, fifteen minutes at their longest, and because the game lets you skip most of the tedium and takes you to where you need to go fairly quickly (in a way that feels totally diegetic!). This brings the focus to what really matters: a narrative that’s fun to go through and uncover, both on its own terms and because it lets you take in more of the game’s absolutely incredible pixel art along the way. I knock it down a bit because it did still feel like a bit of a grind going through everything even with the concessions made, but otherwise this is a super neat little RPGMaker horror. And it’s free, as well! 8/10.

FAITH: Chapter III (2022):

Developed by: Airdorf
Original Position: 6/37
Played Before? No.

Man, if Chapter II was a major expansion on the original game, FAITH: Chapter III is on another level. Once again the scope of the game expands, and in addition to extending to a nearly three hour runtime (again, without wearing out its welcome or feeling like it’s too long), I love the way the game manages to add new mechanics and complications to the game — setpieces forcing the player to change the way they approach the game in a way that feels tense yet not unfun or antithetical to how the rest of the game is played. I also really enjoy how combat feels redefined. It plays exactly as it had in the previous two games, but enemy design feels so much more varied here — bosses each with new mechanics you have to work around, enemies with different patterns you have to remember and apply, it all really feels like there was a focus made on stepping up how the game played while still making it feel the same. I… would still knock it down a bit for some issues with signposting: while most of the game is fine on this front, some of the requirements for secret bosses require knowledge from outside the game or make you interact with things that take too long to provide different interactions and it felt kind of oblique. Otherwise… yeah, this was great. Every single advancement made here feels like it was made for the better, and also in a way that doesn’t take away from what was originally there, in a way that… honestly feels like a magnum opus for this series. It’s just kind of incredible how it kept managing to get better with each new installment. 8/10.

DEFCON (2006):

Developed by: Introversion Software
Played Before? No.

Even after having played it, I’m still not sure I quite have a full picture of DEFCON. This… mostly owes to it being… something a la Civilization, where you’re meant to replay it over and over under different parameters, though I think this one runthrough was… enough to get the point. The game depicts and lets the player enact a situation of mutual nuclear destruction, and does a lot to really sell how… bleak it is, the minimalism in the music and the graphics/artstyle doing a lot to lay bare what’s happening here. I’m also into how the game… doesn’t really lend itself to gameyness, particularly in how it ends — petering out once everybody has run out of weapons not into an announcement of who wins, but a simple game over screen. I’d… maybe need to see more in terms of how it plays (and how multiplayer would work) to really feel like I have a full idea of this game and how it plays, but, from what I was able to see I was decently impressed. It’s horror in a more indirect way than all of the other games I played this marathon, but it’s effective horror nonetheless.

The Convenience Store (2020):

Developed by: Chilla's Art
Original Position: 27/38
Played Before? No.

This… felt fairly run-of-the-mill. It’s one of those ‘job simulator’ sort of games, where the horror comes as something slowly creeping into your status quo, and it… sure does hit the exact same beats I’ve seen in games like these before. It’s hard to really remember much about it, in all honesty: it does all the things you’d expect a game like this to do but it doesn’t particularly have the creativity or style to make those things seem fun or unique or interesting. Most of what comes to mind were the gameplay frustrations — the trek to the titular convenience store every night where nothing ever happens, the puzzles/gameplay sections which just felt kinda finicky and annoying, how a lot of the game is just waiting for the next thing to happen so you can wait for the next thing to happen. Perhaps if it was shorter, and maybe got to the point a little quicker, I’d be more willing to vibe with it, but as is… there are other games out there that do everything this game is going for but better. 5/10.

#54

The Low Saturation Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me (2022):

Developed by: Supermassive Games
Original Position: 30/39
Played Before? No.

I don’t like pointing out quote-unquote ‘plot holes.’ It’s a pedantic, lazy way of judging a work and often feels like it’s missing the forest for the trees — not questioning, say, broader issues with the structure or writing or something to instead point and go “but why didn’t they do [thing I, a rational mind, would instead do in this situation]. this is a problem with the work. ding!” What it ignores, in particular, is that literally everything has these inconsistencies or little mistakes if you squint hard enough — and that it’s up to the work as a whole to… work as a whole, in a way that patches these small issues over and makes any inconsistencies not seem as glaring. Some of my favourite books, films, games, etc. usually do have problems… but they’re either minor, or I enjoy the work to such an extent that I don’t feel guilty ignoring whatever those issues might be. To me, it’s always ‘does this thing I’ve noticed actually impact the work, or my enjoyment of it in a meaningful way?’ If it doesn’t, and there aren’t any major issues, then hey, look, nobody’s perfect, and you did a good enough job otherwise, so thumbs up. If there are issues, and they’re a bit more meaningful, then… the work has some problems on its hands.

The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me is a game I feel has some major issues preventing me from enjoying it. And while I’ve seen comments online, and heard comments made while I was streaming the game that say it’s objectively bad because what the characters did was not what the person commenting would do… I feel comments like those are only surface level, and if I’m really going to try and get into why I felt the game fell flat I think it’s more important to look at the bigger picture, and what these small issues represent on a larger scale.

The game follows the crew of Lonnit Entertainment, a true crime investigative team who specialize in digging up the history of famous old serial killers, as they receive an invitation to a replica of a hotel owned by H.H Holmes, with whom the game seems convinced was “The First American Serial Killer” (the only accurate word in that declaration is “American”). Upon arrival, however, their host disappears on them, and they start to clue in that none of this is quite what it seems. Soon, they find out that the replica hotel (supposedly) possesses just as many deathtraps as the real thing, and that somebody’s hunting them down, one by one. It’s up to the player to explore the hotel, solve puzzles, and make tough decisions, that’ll either mean escape for all five group members, or make sure they don’t make it out of the hotel alive…

Gameplay-wise, I’ll give it credit: it functions well. That might sound rather backhanded, but what I mean by that statement is that regardless of the elements around it, the skeleton of the game itself works. To its core: The Devil in Me is a game where you influence a story in motion and choose what the characters do, with the intent of determining whether they live or die. To this extent, it succeeds fairly well: for its rather small scale, the game does a good job of letting your choices influence the narrative, and the sections where you can potentially get characters killed… mostly feel fair — if you’re observant, and can key into the game’s logic, you can get everybody out okay. If you don’t, you can at least understand what went wrong, and how exactly your choice got that character killed. There are also some really effective individual setpieces, ones where you have to think your way out of a situation, that really work to amp up the stress and make you worry about whether you’re making the correct choice, and these sections… honestly do make it work as a horror game — keeping the stress level up for the rest of the runtime and… never really stopping once it gets started.

Unfortunately, it takes a long while to start. You might think, by my writeup above, that the main plot gets going rather quickly. It doesn't. The first four hours of what’s only a 7-8~ hour game are dedicated to having… basically nothing happen. Instead you’re subjected to endless gameplay segments of exploring the island and the mansion which take up so much time and establish nothing in the meantime. Other games by Supermassive had these sections too, but they were much shorter — and mostly served either to bridge two parts of the story together or represent something, such as you, as the player, trying to dig up info in a specific place. Here they felt so bloated, especially since there seem to be a lot more puzzles gating progress than I feel these games ever had: each character has their own unique talent they can use to interact with things around them (and none of them ever feel like they’re particularly potent or meaningful) there’s a whole system around object physics and using them as a stepping stone to continue your way into the next room you can’t find the exit to because the game is so poorly lit that after nightfall hits it’s almost impossible to see what’s around you. There’s one I particularly liked — one where the feeling like you’re getting lost seems intentional, in a way that diegetically leads you into a later plot point, but as a whole all the puzzles, all the parts where you had to traverse from point A to point B felt like padding. Like, maybe the intention of the first was to start the story slow and build up the characters, but…

…aside from one, maybe two of them I really didn’t feel the cast of five was all that well defined. A good majority of them feel like blank slates of people. While some people get traits or character beats attached to them, they seem rather superficially applied: one character has a whole scene stop to establish that they’re deathly afraid of heights, and then later on when he and another character have to walk across a plank over a sheer drop into the ocean… he just crosses it immediately, without the player’s input, without even so much as a reaction, and it’s the other dude who you have to navigate to the other side. Then, later, when the same guy is up in a lighthouse… suddenly he’s afraid of heights again? Literally the only distinct trait we’re given for him and it’s not even handled consistently. And also… it doesn’t really feel like anybody changes as people during the course of the story, or has some sort of arc. There are token gestures (oh, I’m a hardcore smoker because it helps with my Anxiety that definitely comes up through the game, totally, absolutely, but now that I’ve survived death island….... nah, I think I’m gonna quit…......) but it really feels like, for a game that at points seems as if it’s trying to personalize the death traps to the people going in them, you could have put switched them around and put them in other people’s situations and they all would’ve turned out the exact same. Which would be fine, maybe, if that wasn’t really meant to be a focus… but then at the end of the game, when it recaps who lived and who dies, it specifically states that the survivors lived because they learned and improved as people which, like… no they didn’t. That didn’t happen. Nothing about what you said impacted whether they lived or died or not. Don’t try to pretend you did more with the characters than you actually did.

And, like, going back to my preamble for a second, there are complaints I’ve read and heard about the game’s stories which maybe address the surface level of a problem, but also I feel like these things speak to deeper flaws in the overall construction. Yes, the killer teleporting everywhere and being able to keep up with the main characters is kind of mind-boggling and tiring (like, maybe it’s a reference to how Jason does this in some of the later F13 movies? but also why would you do a throwback to one of the most decried elements of those movies?) but it also speaks to how poorly defined the island is — where is anything on this island in relation to each other? How can the killer go back to chasing one group of characters, then head over to a different building that seems to be nowhere near where he was before and menace a different group of characters there, then just as easily go back to chasing the original group again? What’s the point in that whole segment where we put in the work to get away from him when he can instantly just catch up again? In addition… look, “the plot requires people to act stupid!” is more universal of a critique than the people who use it seem to realize: if whoever writes it can sell it well, then I’m totally willing to buy that maybe a character can be a dumbass and get himself into trouble. It’s much harder of a sell when I, as the player, am being forced to do… things that seem kinda blatantly suicidal in the name of progressing the plot forward. There’s a part of the game where you’re exploring a basement where I came into a room, explored, and found no way forward other than some locked doors a conveyor belt which the game made quite an effort to establish would be insanely dangerous for a human to enter. So I went “okay, so I won’t” and then looked up a walkthrough to see how to get through the locked door… only to find out that the only way out was to go on the conveyor belt. If the game maybe had a cutscene where, say, the character jumps on it because the killer was threatening them at that very moment and the conveyor belt was the only way out, I’d buy it (IIRC there’s a similar thing in Until Dawn during a chase scene) but when I, as the person trying to explore and escape the room, are repeatedly denied other options beside something I wouldn’t want to do… it gets grating. Real quick.

And honestly… the game as a whole felt fairly grating, given how much stuff there was obviously padding and how some of the stuff that isn’t is in service to… ‘develop’ characters who never really felt all that defined in the first place. There’s neat stuff — cool setpieces, and it does mostly function as far as choice and consequence are concerned, but… I didn’t have a particularly fun time with this game. And when you look past the surface level stuff you see people point out and try and look at the bigger (dark) picture, these issues are painted by deeper problems overall, and given how these rot the frame in which this story is built on… I think this one needed to go back to the drawing board. 4/10.

#55

We Can Be Heroes (2020):

Directed by: Robert Rodriguez
Original Position: 4/8
Watched Before? No.

This wasn’t particularly exceptional — nor do I think it really intended to be — but this was decently fun. I’m always a fan of how Rodriguez does his kids movies. There’s really a sense of fun in how he plays the child power fantasy, and it's nice that even a decade-ish after the last Spy Kids film that thematic statement of ‘kids are capable of things adults aren’t and have the power to save the world’ is still there. I’m a little sad that the most manic and out-there parts of his style smoothed over: whether that’s because the script was edited or because he was more naturally able to integrate everything together or whether the CGI is actually pretty solid here, who knows. Aside from that… yeah it was solid. The performances from the child actors are all pretty decent, the script has some neat moments and neat twists and turns (though I love that one character literally has the power to rewind time and yet he never seems to use it to undo any of the mistakes the group makes unless the story allows him to) and the action sequences are creative and fun. Again, it’s nothing really special — and it’s not something I’d really care to watch again on its own, but… I wouldn’t hate having my kid watch this, I reckon. 6/10.

Final Fantasy VIII (1999):

Developed by: Square
Original Position: 25/40
Played Before? Two attempts before this, though neither got all that far in the game.

I’m going to start out by taking you through this first part of the game step by step. You begin with Squall, an anti-social GARDEN military trainee, who has yet to meet the love of his life. First off, if this storyline is truly to reach epic levels, then I hope one of the lovers dies. From Shakespeare to The English Patient to Titanic, death has proven to be the most effective instrument of high romantic drama.

As you can see, the full-motion video is impressive, but sometimes the characters feel dead inside. They’re too mechanical. Rinoa’s eyes aren’t lively enough, and Squall’s face shows no character. He’s over-idealized, and the emptiness he feels inside isn’t quite captured in his eyes and facial expressions. Perhaps that will change. If you think Squall looks young, check out Zell, the ultimate geekazoid. Look how he smiles right into the camera! Can you get any cheesier than that?

Oh well. When you’re in class, go into the tutorial in the study panel on your desk. Here you can download your first two Guardian Forces (or ‘GFs’). A guardian force is a powerful mythical creature, or spirit, which casts and defends against certain types of magic. Shiva’s elemental magic is ice, so she’s effective against fire enemies. Once you download the GFs, leave the classroom. When you run into Selphie, tell her you don’t have the time to give her a tour, and then from which she came. Notice the guy on the right: he’ll give you seven magic cards for later use. Take the cards and go down the elevator. On the next floor, keep walking out toward the screen until you find Quistis your teacher. Talk to her and then leave the irritating music of Balamb GARDEN.

Welcome to the overworld, home of dated PlayStation graphics. If you look at the ocean and face left, you’ll spot a cave behind a small forest area. Go there to fight Ifrit, the fire boss. If you beat him, you can equip him as a GF. You’ll quickly learn the only way to cast non-GF magic spells is to draw the spells from your enemies while in battle. Personally, I like this system a lot, it gives weaker characters something productive to do while you wait for the impending doom of your character’s GF. Sometimes only one GF will be effective on a larger enemy. In Final Fantasy VIII, once you draw a magic spell, you can either store it or cast it. Therefore, enemies with cure spells can actually help you heal yourself.

The junction system is confusing at first, but you should get the hang of it in about thirty minutes. The menu system could be much more organized, especially the sub-menus that are open by pressing X while on another screen. If you don’t read the mandatory in-game tutorials, you’ll never know they exist. For every con there is a pro, however. One con is that the status screen does not show which GFs are equipped. One pro is that item and magic inventory lists are now composed of pages: no more endlessly scrolling item lists!

For extended critical analysis of this game, visit FlightsOfFantasy.com, where we discuss the pros and cons of the Junction system, the pacing problems of the battle system left over from Final Fantasy VII, and some minor story quirks.

Final Fantasy VIII is a must-buy: it’s not perfect, and as of yet the story is more plot-driven than character-driven, but this game is perhaps the most engaging RPG of all time. The easy difficulty level allows you to freely enjoy the momentum of the story above all else. While traditional RPG elements like armour and money are less apparent in this title, it’s a nice change of pace without them. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to see them again.

Look for continued coverage of this game soon. Oh by the way, if Square doesn’t have voiceovers in Final Fantasy IX, I’m committing suicide. I hate text.

[+] source: www.youtube.com. (n.d.). GITCY: Final Fantasy VIII. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VNiE6dGnVs [Accessed 9 Aug. 2023].

#56

Final Fantasy VIII (1999):

Developed by: Square
Original Position: 25/40
Played Before? Two attempts before this, though neither got all that far in the game.

I’m not really sure what the general consensus on Final Fantasy VIII is, but among my circles… it’s divisive. In one circle, it’s generally loathed: they don’t like the cast, they definitely don’t like the battle system, and if you try to talk about how you actually like those things you’re going to be starting an argument. My other circle… are a bit more lowkey about it, but they vibe with it — because of the setting, the cast, and because of how weird and interpretive the plot can be. It’s… an interesting dichotomy — hearing people talk shit in one Discord server only for me to then look over and see my other friends talk positively about it, with me, in the middle, not really knowing which side I leant closer to. I’d played the game before, but not enough before my PS3 crapped out and stopped me from playing it, the only impression I really had being that… it was a game I definitely wanted backseating for. Which was why I didn’t initially pick it back up once I got other options to play it, but then, this year, I needed to beat an RPG released before 2000, and I had a slot open up, so I figured ‘hey, let’s finally play it and see on what side of the axis I fall.’ So I did, and I went through all ~45 hours, and ultimately…

…It’s okay.

Which, for an RPG such as this, is a bit of an indictment. If I’m playing something that veers that long, then… I really want to be doing more than just going through the motions. It’s a bit as to why I don’t play RPGs as often as some of my friends do: the time investment is way too high for something to be merely ‘fine,’ or even 'good.' If something really draws me in and makes me invested, then it really makes the runtime fly by (even if I’m usually like “okay, I’m ready to wrap this up” long before I reach the end). If the game isn’t all that great, then I can still at least look at what’s in motion and see where exactly things are going wrong, even if I could maybe do the same thing with a game that’s much shorter. If the game is merely cromulent, then it truly just becomes a drag. What might be 35 hours feels more like 90. I could drop the game for months or even years and still not regain the spark that initially pulled me in. I truly only keep on out of a feeling of obligation — whatever reason I chose to play the game in the first place, my inbuilt headworms that will not let any game go unfinished if I can help it. Final Fantasy VIII… fares better than most other RPGs of that ilk, being mostly shorter (and structured in a way where you can really just gun it to the end after a certain point), but… to be honest, if I wasn’t playing this the way I was playing it, the game as background noise as I hangout with online friends… I probably would have lost interest in beating this. At least within a reasonable timeframe. It’s not the game that really would’ve held me onto it otherwise.

The story follows Leon Squall Leonheart, a recently graduated child soldier trained at Balamb Garden: a boarding school and mercenary force deployed all over the world. While Squall is one of the best in his field — one of two people in the whole world capable of using a gunblade — he’s far less capable in his personal life, his blunt and aloof demeanour pushing his cohort away from him. However, on his first mission — to help a resistance effort liberate a city from foreign control — he finds himself in too deep on multiple fronts: with a simple mission of assassinating the president slowly exposing a web of political ramifications that soon put the world itself at stake, with Squall’s walls slowly breaking down as his mission places him in the company of Shiva Rinoa Heartly, a girl who seems absolutely hellbent on breaking him out of his shell.

I’ll start off by getting the most pervasive thing out of the way: the junction system sucks. The way it works is that… effectively, rather than armour or weapons, you instead equip spells onto yourself to directly boost your stats, but the whole process is explained so poorly (I do love the tutorial being given to me two or three words at a time) and implemented in such an overcomplicated way that it was such a drag every time I had to interface with it. This is mostly because the initial requirement is to equip your summons (or ‘GFs’, as they’re called in-game) in order to junction your stats — and while I assume the intention was for each party member to be equipped with their own GFs, GFs also require EXP to learn new passive skills and increase their stats, which means that if you don’t want to have any of your GFs fall behind… all of them have to be in the party at once. This means that every time you switch party members, you have to manually rejunction everybody, navigating through menus or menus to individually pick which magic best fits each stat (there’s a thing that’ll automatically pick magic for you, and a system that lets you switch magic inventories with other party members, but they both suck) and it’s so miserable to have to interact with. It’s especially bad whenever the party splits into several groups: you’ll junction one group, presuming you’ll do something with them… then before you even get to go into a fight you’re forced to play as the other group and then you have to manually rejunction them… until the point where you actually switch back and rejunction them, and then you switch back again and have to rejunction them, etc etc etc…

And the draw system works, I feel, to make combat… way too simplistic and not particularly engaging. As opposed to previous Final Fantasy games, where spells are limited by an overall MP pool, magic here instead must be drawn from enemies as an action in combat, with each use of draw giving you a couple of uses of whatever spells they have assigned to them. This, theoretically, eliminates the woes of having to deal with MP… but the limited amount of casts allowed for a specific spell, and the somewhat tedious process the player is initially stuck with to get more spells afterwards often make magic feel too costly to use — especially since this magic is much better junctioned to your stats than cast in battle. Summons, comparatively, do more damage and are almost entirely free to use… but then proceed to make you watch a 30+ second animation every time you summon them, with no real interaction rather than a rather finicky button-mashing minigame you can unlock to boost its power. Regular attacks (and fishing for Limit Breaks) instead become your primary way of interacting with enemies as you reach the later stages, partially because it’s your highest damage option, partially because… the lack of variety in enemy types or gimmicks (nothing in this game resists physical damage) often means that there’s no reason to do anything other than keep attacking, making for strategically bare and rather boring fights. This lack of variety, I feel, also ranges to your party: the only things that separate each of them mechanically are what magic they have in their inventory and what limit break they happen to have, meaning that there's never a need to build a specific party for a specific threat, nor is there any real way you can build a specific strategy using your party's unique capabilities, making combat as a whole feel... rather simple, once you navigate through all the fluff surrounding functioning and drawing. There are exceptions, of course — bosses which possess a diverse and imposing moveset (or a gimmick overarching the battle) where often the key to defeating them is located through the spells you can draw from them, but as a whole… I was really not into this battle system, especially given how slow all the animations feel and how frequent (like, every two steps in some parts of the overworld) they were.

The story… is something I have mixed feelings about. It starts off well: the initial section where you’re at school is a fairly decent introduction to the characters and mechanics, I really like the way the subsequent mission slowly escalates off the rails — as it goes from something routine for a freshly graduated soldier to a situation where the characters are… way in over their heads, and I like how the characters grapple with that. I’m also a fan of the flashback sequences: they help to set up how… abstract the plot can get, and on their own they’re fun little isolated episodes that take decent advantage of the game’s strength in scenario and character writing. However, I feel like once the plot starts approaching its final act (rooooughly right at the start of Disc 3) the plot itself kind of falls apart. Most of the plot threads the story had actively been following right up to the end of Disc 2 feel like they get dropped, and in its place the game just dumps a ton of exposition about people and things that had never appeared or had been brought up beforehand without any real explanation of who they are or what they even mean. What happens subsequently feels… slapdash — while there’s a decent emotional throughline that takes you from place to place I really felt like things were just happening without any setup or justification. This culminates in a final confrontation with the main antagonist I found… rather weak — for how much the game throws everything out of the way to try and establish who she is and what her goals are, the one actual interaction we get with her is… truly just “I am Chaos! I will cause Time Compression (what does that even mean)! Mwahahahaha, prepare to die!” I can understand things becoming more abstract and reliant on the personal interpretation of the player — I particularly liked the ending FMV for how out there it got — but from my perspective a lot of what constituted the lategame… wasn’t that: it felt more like the plot lost a lot of its internal coherence and started rushing towards a conclusion… rather alien to what it was initially set out as.

The cast, I feel, was the consistent strong suit of the game. I wouldn’t necessarily place them among my favourite RPG ensembles, or anything, but they’re consistently solid and fun and the best parts of the game’s writing. Even when the plot takes a turn for the worse — and, at the same time, the rest of the cast takes a backseat for Squall and Rinoa — the game still makes sure to give them little moments and never lets them fall into irrelevance. Leon Squall was somebody I expected to not be into, but I like the way his internal thought process is represented (all the times he’s insecure about something, or whenever he’s second-guessing himself) and I like the way he slowly thaws and opens up over the course of the game. Shiva Rinoa is a really cool counterpoint to him; I’ll admit that sweet and sour romances are loosely a bit my thing — and I kind of like the way the love triangle compares to FF7 — with you being one of the two on the outside as opposed to being the one at the centre — but I love how continuous she is about challenging Squall and trying to break down his walls. Selphie is my favourite of this party: she’s just so fun and it’s always a blast to see how straight-up psychotic she is under her energetic and friendly exterior. Quistis… is the one weak link — I feel like she loses her lane once the Squall/Rinoa will-they-won’t-they begins — but I’m fond of how much she just fucks with Squall during Disc 1. Irvine’s someone who’s ostensibly a side character, but I like the dramatic beats he gets: he carries a non-zero amount of the plot on his shoulders and I reckon he handles it in a way that does him fairly well and helps to set up and foreshadow that particular plot thread. Zell… got a lot less than I was thinking he would going in, but he’s cool: he’s not a particularly revolutionary take on the ‘hothead doofus’ archetype but he pretty consistently delivers on that front. As a whole… I do like the more down to Earth approach they took with your main party: it strikes a good balance of matching the military tone of the (earlier) story while still making them feel distinct and fun as characters. As far as Final Fantasy games go… I don’t think I’d rank them that high as a unit compared to the casts surrounding them, but I do think this is one of those games where the cast is what delivers: the consistently best moments were all bits the cast had with each other, and as I progressed through the plot I did so because I wanted to see what this group would say next.

Some other notes: Triple Triad is fun. I wish the AI for it was a little better (they always seemed to be playing to not lose, rather than playing to win), but it’s a fun little strategic dopamine booster and never got old even when I was grinding for specific cards. I’m a fan of the crafting system: it provides a much less tedious way of getting specific magic than trying to draw from enemies would, and I like how it and the level-scaling reconfigure grinding — instead of grinding to gain levels directly, you’re doing it to search for certain tools, either to craft into something strong or to refine into particularly strong spells. The final dungeon has a neat gimmick, one that inserts a breath of strategy into the otherwise sterile battle system, as you have to pick and choose what parts of it you need for the next fight or can save for later — though I think it’s too little, too late. By the time I reached it I just powered through it as quickly as possible because I was at the point where I wanted the game to end. The FMVs still look really good today, and it’s so cool how seamlessly the game can go from a cutscene rendered in-engine to FMV and back again. Every time one happened (which was a lot) I was pretty impressed.

As a whole… I definitely have some mixed feelings about this game. For as well as the story starts, and for as much as I enjoyed the cast the whole way through, I felt encumbered by the tedious and honestly quite rough battle system. And while I did enjoy how weird and abstract the later parts of the story could get, the story itself really goes in a direction for the worse: where things happen in a way that feels quite overcomplicated and where important people or events just suddenly appear and are relevant out of the blue. As a whole… I’m still not particularly sure where I fall in the debate about FF8. Maybe I’m a bit closer to the side of the people who like it because… in the end, I don’t think I hated it, but ultimately… I don’t think that appeals to me. I didn’t really love it, either. 5/10.

#57

Layers of Fear (2016):

Developed by: Bloober Team
Original Position: 34/41
Played Before? No

The viral success of Hideo Kojima’s 2014 game PT — like any innovation, or new breaking of the ground in the confines of a genre — brought forward a slew of imitators which… didn’t quite understand what made the original work as well as it did. On one hand, a part of the attraction of PT is its novelty: a lot of the things it did, such as the looping hallway (and how things change between each rendition of the loop), were genuinely revolutionary for the time. And while you’re fully allowed to wear your influences on your sleeves, if you just deploy elements of it without much of a critical eye as to how to make it yours, not only do you doom your thing to being derivative, but it also prompts diminishing returns: familiarity breeding contempt, a joke becoming less and less funny the more times its repeated, etc etc. Another part of the core appeal to PT — and one I feel really can’t be emulated — is its mystique, and its sort of status as a lost media: PT in itself was never meant to be a standalone experience, it was a taste test for a something more that never came to be, deleted off the Playstation store to the point where the only way one can actually experience PT is through YouTube playthroughs. To create a ‘full version’ of PT, or to create your own version of it feels oxymoronic: because a lot of the actual appeal in it is how it’s ultimately an incomplete experience, and by trying to fill in the gaps, all you’re really doing is making your emulation of it incomplete, just in a much different, less evocative way.

Of course, that’s not the only reason PT is as effective as it is. Another core part of how it works is pacing, and overall length: PT hits the ground running and does everything it wants to do in ~20 minutes. None of that time is wasted, there’s never really a moment where the player’s not doing anything of note, you’re on for a ride, from beginning to end, and… the game never repeats itself. There’s a veritable bag of cool tricks that the game’s willing to show to its player, but any of those given tricks is only shown once before the game then moves on to something else. A non-zero amount of these clones up the runtime, which in addition to often introducing issues with the pacing (by, say, adding loops where nothing happens, or by doing the same particular scare again, and again, and again,), can often lead the game to wear out whatever welcome it had. Layers of Fear, the debut (not counting DS ports of other games) effort from Polish studio Bloober Team… quite freely professes to be inspired by PT, and attempts to take what it did and try to create a ‘full experience’ out of it. To its credit, despite the three-hour runtime, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. If, mainly, because it never quite gives much of a welcome in the first place.

You play as a once-famous painter (with his life in ruins after initially unspecified events) dedicated to creating his masterpiece. However, to make his masterpiece he has to collect inspiration for it first, and so must explore your house, navigating the constantly changing corridors, uncovering the layers of who this painter really is, all in service to create a painting befitting of your talent. I’ll give this game credit: the story itself functions, for the most part. It’s not revolutionary, but it presents a nice little mystery that digs into the little details and… genuinely did not do what I expected it to do, and that compliment is only half-backhanded. The lack of initial context given beyond ‘you were a famous painter but also damn, bitch, you live like this?’ does a good job at… painting a picture, but not a complete one, and with each progression in the plot a little more gets filled in until eventually you get a full grasp on who you are, what’s going on, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. I’m also a fan of the visual design of the house — it nails the old-timey decrepit mansion aesthetic perfectly, and I like the way the game represents the whole ‘the hallways move’ thing. There are landmarks, and specific rooms you return to, but there’s no frame of reference to where anything is, and it really captures the feeling of, like, stumbling around, drunk, knowing that you should know where you are despite feeling hopelessly lost… then making it to a place you recognize and finally feeling it all click together.

It’s a shame, for as much as walking through the mansion feels decently atmospheric… the actual act of playing the game falls far, far more flat. The game is effectively a ‘walking simulator’ — a game where the focus is on the narrative, and where player interactivity is rather limited — but it feels more like one of those Newgrounds flash games where you click around a room aimlessly until eventually you trigger a jumpscare and you get to move on. The entire game experience is walking down corridors and then walking around in place until the game opens up another corridor for you to go down, and it never feels like you’re uncovering anything, working towards a specific goal, or anything that provides more motivation for the player to actively want to move forward. There’s the occasional puzzle — sometimes a key you have to find, or a code you have to enter — and, to this game’s cr- oh literally the answer is just displayed on that wall over there, so much for having to maybe actually work for my progress. Whatever blocks your progress is very minimal. And whatever happens while you’re progressing is very minimal. Theoretically — given that the story fragments are mostly just crumbs gated behind said progression — this would allow for the horror of this game to take the front stage, but…

…I’m sorry, but this game isn’t really scary at all. I know that that’s subjective — I’m sure, at the time of release, there were so many YouTubers proclaiming this to be the SCARIEST GAME EVER?????? — but the effort made here to try and scare the player feels so lacking. Jumpscares just happen. There’s no buildup, there’s nothing really… disturbing it tries to evoke, you’re just trying to look around a room or walk down a hallway when something an object moves and there’s a music cue and there’s really no reaction I ever had to them other than “uh, okay, moving on.” The game is fond of using the same tricks over and over again — doors opening only to reveal brick walls behind them, the player falling through the floor — which, even beyond how each reuse provides diminishing returns, just kind of proves to show how few tricks the game has in the first place, and how ineffective they feel. I’m not one to use ‘it’s not scary’ as a criticism — what’s ‘scary’ is subjective, and on my end I mostly respond more to things that are stressful than scary — but here, that’s what it comes down to. A lot of the game hinges on it being scary: it’s what the atmosphere of the house is building up to, it’s the connective tissue between the story crumbs, but it falls so flat. The scares are limp, cookie-cutter, and even if they weren’t taken from other games that… did what this was trying to do way more effectively and concisely, they don’t work on their own merit. They’re too low-effort in application, and whatever could have maybe been effective is diluted and washed out by poor execution and copious repetition.

In essence… well, the essence is “we wanted to do our own PT!” which… in itself set the game up for failure from the word go, but even besides that… this wasn’t particularly potent. There’s potential in the story, and I quite enjoyed the environmental design, but from the simplistic and aimless nature of the gameplay and the game’s utter incapability to provide a single effective scare… the layers only go skin deep. What you see is what you get. And what I saw… sure did not impress me. 3/10.

#58

Simulacra 3 (2022):

Nominated by: Toben
Developed by: KAIGAN Games
Original Position: 26/42
Played Before? No

I liked the first two Simulacra games! They’re… certainly not perfect — in fact, I’d go as far to say they’re quite flawed, in places — but they really do exactly what they set out to. They’re concise, fun little FMV games that take the concept of “go into a missing person’s phone to solve their disappearance” to some fun places, and at the end of the day always link back to their core concept in a way that… really makes it feel like it’s not just a gimmick, that being on a phone is a core part of the experience, and that to change it to something else would result in something else entirely. Sure, the voice acting is… rather inconsistent, and the writing has a tendency to make the cast a lot less likable than intended, but even discounting how… I’d probably give it a pass anyway given that these games are from a Malaysian studio, sometimes that sort of thing can unintentionally work in a game’s favour: sometimes having your asshole ex-boyfriend character be a total dick really manages to sell him as somebody who’s totally at fault in the situation. Sometimes one of the major parts of your narrative (and the road to avoiding the worst ending) involves placating and not alienating a guy who's… oftentimes totally cringe and easy to make fun of. Sometimes you’re talking about the inauthenticity of influencer culture, and having your influencer characters come off as unsympathetic and coarse to be around really helps to sell that message. It’s… definitely a fine line to tell whether it’s intentional or unintentional on the game’s part, but regardless, there’s virtue in being able to turn your weaknesses into a strength, and I think Simulacra and its direct sequel really do a good job at patching up those holes.

So when I found out that a new game in the series had released, I was pretty down to see how the series continued. I found it… odd, that it’d been released as quietly as it had — and for games I discovered through YouTube playthroughs it was definitely weird to see nobody I follow pick up and play this game at all — but I eventually got around to it and found, ultimately… something I don’t feel quite managed to work around its flaws quite as well as the first two games did. And, sad to say, I think I found something that didn’t quite have as strong a core concept as the first two. Or, in fact, that clear of a core concept at all.

You play as an intern at the local paper, tasked with helping out the lead journalist, Ruby Myers, as she investigates a series of disappearances around the town of Stonecreek. One day, the phone of Paul Castillo — the latest missing person — is mysteriously sent to Ruby, and she bequeaths it to you: both to search for any potential clues inside, and to help her as she does most of the legwork. Upon delving into Paul’s phone, it soon becomes clear that these disappearances are something supernatural in nature, and that Paul has rigged up his phone to serve as a breadcrumb trail, where by finding clues more parts of his phone and history are unlocked, leading the player to dig into the history of Stonecreek, interact with Paul’s former contacts, and hope that the end of the trail leads to a solution to the problem: a way to eliminate the supernatural threat before it takes any more victims.

As a base premise, it works, and as a game, the pieces are all there. It’s satisfying to be able to dig deep into somebody’s history and slowly piece together everything, and I like how the reward for finding clues or making progress is oftentimes being able to access more parts of the phone. It provides an interesting method of story progression beyond how the plot moves forward: for every step you take you’re made more privy to background info, which then feeds into you figuring out what to do next. There were some fairly neat puzzles — and one particular section involving accessing Paul’s home security which felt fairly standout, even if in practice I… felt it could’ve stood to be a bit more involved, or a bit more difficult. Most of all, I really do enjoy how much work was put into making Stonecreek feel like a real, lived-in community: from the chatter of incidental townspeople on the town social media app, the focus on local urban legends and ghost stories, the way your direct contacts talk about the place, there’s a real focus on painting this picture of a small town undergoing gentrification, and I think it pays off.

What maybe doesn’t work as well is the story itself: particularly, the people you directly interact with as you try and solve the mystery. This is what I was referring to during my preamble. The story hinges considerably on the player liking the cast of contacts in Paul’s phone, but the writing’s never quite there. Ruby’s potentially the biggest victim of this: you’re meant to be her sidekick, and a lot of the heft for the late stages of the game hinges on you having formed a connection with her, but there wasn’t really a lot of spunk or voice in the words she was saying to me: it felt like she was nagging me around for most of the game, and a lot of her conflict regarding the ethics of journalism/her place in Stonecreek felt more like things the game was trying to establish were her Traits rather than natural topics that popped up during gameplay. Paul, as the person you’re hoping you can maybe find, felt characterized through what we rummaged through, but for someone you mainly see through FMVs the acting was… not there (and, as a sidenote, there were wayyyy too many videos where Paul just parses over his notes or his corkboard where absolutely nothing happens), and I really felt as I was going through Paul’s history that I was doing so for the overall mystery rather than anything for Paul himself. The other characters felt… mostly there, more than anything. They’re defined and likable enough, but they lack story presence — you talk to them for one section of the game and then you don’t talk to them again and then you suddenly actually do have to talk to them again and it felt… abrupt, and a rather weak attempt at bringing it all together.

I also felt like a lot of the overall framing and concept was rather loose in how it came together, to the point where I felt the game never really took full advantage of the ‘found phone’ aspect of it. Specifically, while I was interested in the theming regarding small town gentrification, and the conflict of interests between the town council and the townspeople, this never quite really interfaces with the mechanics, or what you access on the phone: while internet comments and news articles talk about it, at best it’s mostly set dressing more than any sort of proper synthesis, and at worst it’s characters expositing that This Is The Main Theme of The Game. While previous games often had you access apps heavily based off real life ones (such as Twitter, Tinder, Instagram) which even beyond providing a sense of verisimilitude, also added a sense of diversity in what you did — sometimes you’d do a puzzle in one app, then you’d have to move to a different app, then you’d have to text someone, etc. Here, the only app other than texts/emails/the general internet is… this weird combination of Facebook/Twitter centered around local Stonecreek businesses that Paul has apparently jury rigged to hide (presumably) public pages from whoever accesses his phone unless they solve his riddles three?

That’s another area where I wasn’t really as into things: a lot of the game mechanics regarding uncovering more parts of the phone felt rather artificial. Rather than digging into a missing person’s phone to try and find them (with tech issues/more supernatural causes preventing you from seeing everything on the phone), you’re on Paul’s ride from the start: he has this grand keikaku he’s trying to guide you through and he apparently foresaw everything you were going to do before the phone ever touched your hands. One that he already has most of the pieces for but also doesn't enact because I guess there wouldn't have been a game otherwise. It never feels like the player is figuring anything out for themselves, nor does it feel like they have any agency, you're just doing what Paul already did for you, with nothing actually getting in the way of his grand plan up until the climax. Roadblocks aren’t “you don’t have the information you need to proceed,” it’s “Paul won’t let you proceed until you know exactly what he wants you to know.” It’s… a unique direction to take, sure, but it felt rather convoluted, and it strained credibility that this guy was able to foresee everything to this extent and also encrypt his… phone, of all things, into some weird horror game puzzle box. It didn’t feel natural. And a lot of the phone stuff in general… didn’t really feel like it really came together.

I also just feel like this game was a bit undercooked. My impression is that COVID played a part in this — actors having to film scenes in isolation, not being able to use exterior sets — but you can see it in other spots as well. There are a lot less FMVs this time around, and other than… I think two, they’re all connected to Paul and Ruby, which comes at the expense of most of the side characters: robbing the player of the chance to see that non-online dimension to them, or for some particular characters not even getting the chance to know what they even look like. The FMVs themselves… are also a bit rough. While there’s some fairly decent CGI across the board, a good portion suffer from having fairly obvious green screens — the climax, in particular, looks like it’s taking place in Minecraft, and even disregarding some of the plot frustrations I had with it it definitely cheapened the effect it was intended to give. I also feel the story suffers from not having a direct confrontation with the villain — and, in particular, from the villain not feeling very well defined at all. I feel like maybe this would’ve helped with my issues regarding themes linking into gameplay: a proper interaction where we understand what the villain, what they represent and their goals I feel could’ve done a lot to bring it all together (and the scenes in Simulacras 1 and 2 where you come face to face with the malevolent entity are fairly easily two of the best scenes in each game), but instead… honestly I’m not sure who the bad guy even was, in the end? They had the same name as the baddie in 1 but given that its MO was totally different it’s probably actually something else? It felt so indistinct. I felt like… a lot of this needed an edit pass. Or maybe a bit more time in the oven.

And in the end… I dunno. I don’t really like judging the worth of something based on its status as a sequel, an adaptation, etc., but I feel like, in comparison, this game is the worst in the trilogy. While there’s a sense of satisfaction in solving puzzles and unfolding the mystery, and while I can see the effort in building the setting and making it feel lived in, the rough character writing and the lack of cohesion between gameplay and theming makes this particular entry feel not quite up to snuff with the rest. 5/10.

#59

Alone in the Dark (2008):

Developed by: Atari, Hydravision Entertainment
Original Position: 39/43
Played Before? No.

From the moment I started to play Alone in the Dark (2008), it was love at first sight. When I first got control of my character, and found out that there was a whole mechanic where the main character had to manually blink to refocus their vision, I knew that this was the start of something special. When I got a taste of… basically everything to do with actually playing the game, I knew that this was going to give me brainworms long, long after I beat it. I love stupid garbage survival horror. I love games that really think they’re pushing the grain when they’re really just doing what everybody else is doing except badly. And I love games with no self-awareness — I love things that have just so much earnestness, that really think they’re going for something, and also have the budget and backing so that I don’t feel like I’m picking on the little guy. This is the type of thing I only get to play, like, once a year, maybe a bit more. I have to treasure them where I can, and… man this thing was a fucking gem.

You play as Edward Carnby, an amnesiac who wakes up in modern-day New York with a gun to his head. While his captors clearly have ill intentions for him, they don’t get to act them out — for they are then intercepted and eaten by malevolent cracks in the floor. While trying to escape the rapidly falling apart building, he learns two things: that the cracks in the floor turn people into zombies, and that these zombies are looking for a mystical stone: one they are under the impression that he has. Meeting up with art dealer Sarah Flores and priest… “Theophile,” they manage to escape the building, only to find that the outside is in just as much chaos, and that sinister forces have been waiting for Carnby to awake for many, many years...

And God it’s amazing. This is a game that cribs from every survival horror popular at the time into some weird amalgamation with the sole purpose of following what’s trendy. The game is absolutely obsessed with action setpieces and sections where you must scale the environment. Every sentence is littered with swear words as if it automatically makes the dialogue that much better. The game pretends like it’s connecting itself to the previous Alone in the Dark games, as if that’ll change the fact that this is completely alien to the series it’s trying to “reboot” if it weren’t for the title, but then it manages to get basic information about the series wrong. Combat is just… incredible. The zombies you go up against only die permanantly when they come into contact with the fire scattered across the landscape, but the only way to actually make them touch the fire is to stun them with the game’s incredible melee combat and drag their bodies over to the flames… but also you can only pull enemies. You can’t push them. If you want to drag them into the flames you have to walk through them yourself. You could also drop a flaming weapon on them (or, like, just hit them with a flaming weapon, but also the game sure likes not letting you attack half the time when you have a flaming weapon for some reason) but… also enemies don’t run faster than you and you never need to backtrack, so, like, why try fighting in the first place? You can just run past them no problem. The game’s really generous with checkpoints and you heal to full every time you come back so, like, there’s no real need to manage resources or anything.

And even with sections that would otherwise be rather unpleasant, that general sense of ‘oh my god, this is a trash fire, it’s so amazing’ really managed to dull whatever pain there might have been. There’s an early part I was directly warned about, where you have to drive a taxi to Central Park while the city collapses around you, and it’s… truly something. The car you’re driving turns absolutely horribly (which, uh, isn’t great from a company that specializes in racing games), and the time you have before any given section kills you is incredibly strict, which means that if you get stuck on the environment, sandbagged by another car, if you accidentally drift too far, or if your game happens to crash, you have to do the whole ~three-minute section right from the beginning. It’s very obviously not great (and, given that you’re allowed to skip ‘scenes’ a la a DVD menu, there’s really no reason to actually do it), but even then it honestly just became a fun challenge, me replaying it… way more times than I honestly should’ve until I finally made it to the end. There’s also a persistent mechanic regarding instakill purple goo on the floor that can only be repelled by light. While later sections involving the goo give you tools to trivialize it, the first one requires you to use your flashlight in a way that’s… decidedly inconsistent — sometimes the goo just won’t go away even when you flashlight it, sometimes you get killed even when it isn’t touching you — but every time you restart it you get this unskippable, really funny cutscene where a bit NPC succumbs to the goo, and it became funnier every single time I was forced to watch it.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon period ended. It wasn’t that it got old, it was more that the game switched things up to actually just be really frustrating and unfun. The game decides to just spam enemies at you, and also gates progression behind understanding mechanics the game never told you about and that you never needed to know beforehand. The “resource management” part of the game goes from being a pointless addition to an active frustration, as you need certain items in order to complete certain puzzles but also you only get a limited amount of the items you need and also you have to shuffle your inventory and drop useless shit you don’t need and it’s such a slog, even when the puzzle itself is relatively straightforward. This culminates near the end when the game decides that actually it wants to be an open-world experience, stopping the game in its tracks and forbidding you from progressing until it deems you’ve wasted enough time you collect enough “spectral vision” in order to see the way to the end. Cue more annoying puzzles, cue more enemy spam, cue more annoying encounters, and more specifically, cue more resource management: as the way to get spectral vision is to destroy tentacles across the map, and the only way to destroy these tentacles is to blow them up: this then means that you have to find the tools you need to blow them up… wherever they are on the map. Better hope that the visual distortion that’s around every tentacle doesn’t mess up your shot, ‘cause if you do, you’re going to be spending a loooooooooong time scrounging around for more bottles.

So… yeah. That whole section of the game sucks. It at least ends on a high note, though. After you’re done with the stupid grinding section, it’s back to the gold standard the first half of the game set: really silly design decisions, a story that’s just a joy to watch unfold, and gameplay that’s mostly just… fun, in a stupid way. I recognize, maybe, that this is a thing that may not appeal to everybody — and that my brain is poisoned in such a way that I can find bad things just as entertaining and worthwhile as good things — but… honestly, even if the game goes too long, and even if the second half of the game takes a pretty major nosedive, I still love this game. Absolutely recommend it. 2/10.

#60

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (2013):

Developed by: The Chinese Room
Original Position: 20/44
Played Before? No.

I’ve found, oftentimes, when a work exists relative to another work — be it a sequel, adaptation, etc. — that the general audience has a tendency to judge it purely by its relation to the original. “Loyalty” becomes the touchstone for which the work is defined, and should it feel significantly different from the original, or change things in adaptation, it’ll be decried as a bad work compared to the original, regardless of its actual quality separated from that context. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, from what I understand, was no stranger to this type of reception. On its original release, in 2013, it was criticized for feeling much more stripped back compared to what it was following up on. Core mechanics that defined Amnesia: The Dark Descent, such as managing your inventory, fueling your light source, and making sure you don’t lose your sanity were not present within Machine For Pigs, in an attempt to gear the game as more of a narrative experience, as was the modus operandi of primary developer The Chinese Room. It was a tall order — especially given just how popular and influential The Dark Descent was for indie horror — and sadly reception proved to be rather mixed because of that. What the general audience wanted was something reminiscent of the original work, and when the process of creating a follow-up resulted in something far different, it was rejected: not on its own merits, but because of outside expectations that this work didn’t entirely cater to.

So it’s a little funny on my end that of all the Amnesia titles, this is the one random chance chose for me to play first. Having not played, or even watched much of anything else to do with the series, I’m coming into this divorced from a lot of the context or outside expectations that surrounded the game on its release. I wouldn’t necessarily feel this game to be stripped back in terms of mechanics, since I never had an understanding of those mechanics in the first place. I wouldn’t think about this game in comparison to the original Amnesia… mostly because I prefer to view things on their own merits, but because I came into the experience absent any previous experience. It’s far from the first game in the series (especially if you consider Amnesia as a spiritual sequel to Penumbra), but, personally, this one would be my first foray into it, and, likely, the blueprint for what I'd expect to see should I delve further into this series.

You play as Osmund Mandus, a wealthy industrialist, who wakes up from a coma of several months right on the last day of the 19th century (or, well, actually a year from the last day of the 19th century, but shhhhhh) to find that his two children are nowhere to be found. His search takes him through his manor, through the streets and sewers of Victorian London, listening to the directions of a mysterious man on the telephone who tells him he knows where his sons are. He’s eventually led into one of his factories, and through this factory, towards a machine of unknown aim and infinite proportions. As he gets closer, however, Osmund finds that the workers of the machine are anything but human, and that he might know more about the machine than he seems to think...

I think this game’s strongest point was its narrative. I think the writing did a good job of getting me to know and like the characters, and I was particularly into the varied, wild directions the plot happened to go. Beyond how effective it is at building up a mystery — and drip-feeding the player information as it slowly unfurls — I think what I really loved is that this is a story that operates on multiple textual levels. While you’re fully capable of taking the game at face value without really feeling like you’re missing out on anything, this is something that begs to be read a little deeper. Particularly, one can question how literal the events going on even are, with a knowledge of Victorian England potentially providing an indication that the events that are depicted… perhaps could be interpreted as a metaphor for something much less fantastical. I made a point to look up plot details after the game specifically because I wanted to know more, which to me I’d say is a compliment as to how much this game made me want to think about it.

As a horror game, I’d also say it’s solidly effective. The nighttime environments feel suitably dark without it being absolutely impossible to see anything (which, believe me, so many games can’t seem to get right). There’s a subtle sense — through how the sounds you keep hearing are the only things that break through the silence, how empty the streets of London are — that something is wrong from the start, driving the core mystery and providing an aura of unease as you delve deeper through the game. I’m also into the way things… escalate as the game goes on: from down to earth as you explore your mansion, then veering into the fantastical as the monsters begin to show up, then more and more off the rails the further you delve into the heart of the machine. The sections with monsters are simple, but effective stealth sections, with their presence feeling imposing enough to make the player not want to mess up. When you’re caught, or when the game dispenses with the idea of stealth, enemies are loud as they rush you down, inspiring a blind panic as you try to figure out how you’re meant to get away. It’s the little things that contribute to a horror game’s atmosphere — and mean just as much as any big setpiece or scare — and in regards to the micro level, I think this game does pretty well on that front.

Where it falters, I feel, is mostly in direct gameplay. Less the ‘walking simulator’ aspect, more when the game throws puzzles at you. They’re mostly fine, but what it really suffers from is a lack of… indication of how your actions affect the world around you. Oftentimes, I’d solve a puzzle, the game would acknowledge that I solved a puzzle… and then I’d have no clue what to do next, either the puzzle requiring an extra step that wasn’t quite clear (at one point I thought the game had glitched and softlocked me), or because the game has issues with signposting where exactly the player needs to go. There were so many points where the game was like “walk down the path we’ve set for you” but the path was in a large enough area that I got lost, or the way forward was absolutely coated in darkness that I couldn’t see it. I kept looking at guides, not for any of the puzzles, but for a lot of what was in-between, when it… really did not feel like that was what the game had intended, nor something that particularly felt like a ‘me’ problem.

Other than that — and divorced from whatever context that might have given me different expectations, or any sort of in-built comparison — I felt that this was a fairly solid narrative game. While a lot of the gameplay, and most of the segments where I was walking from place to place, felt like they could’ve been made more clear, I felt the horror to be rather effective, and the story to be something super worth delving into and interpreting. As my personal first experience with this series, I felt like this was a fairly decent introduction. Can't wait to be shocked that the next game in the series has actual mechanics. 6/10.

Alone in the Dark (1992):

Developed by: Infogrames
Original Position: 24/45
Played Before? No.

The first survival horror game! Or, well, if not the first survival horror game, it’s at least the first 3D survival horror game. Or, well, if not the first 3D survival horror game, it at least sets up the template that later genre-codifiers such as Resident Evil or Silent Hill would later popularize. Classic conventions of the genre, like exploring a non-linear map, resource scarcity, and inventory management, while iterated and simplified in the years since, originally had their place here. A lot of the issues that the developers had to work around — the use of dramatic, fixed-camera frames, and a control system where you move your character in a way akin to a car in order to obscure that the landscapes you walked around were only 2D images — would be repeated with a degree of intention, even as advancements in technology and processing power meant that later developers would not have to adhere to the limitations Alone in the Dark faced. Even despite predating what it inspired by roughly 4-5 years, Alone in the Dark… honestly still plays exactly like one of its progeny, and while it might be outshone by what came after it, I… definitely still think this game is worth taking a look at, even regardless of its place in history.

You can play as one of two characters: Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood. Regardless of who you pick, the general premise is the same: a man by the name of Jeremy Hartwood has committed suicide by mysterious circumstances, and in the wake of his death, either Edward or Emily has been sent up to his attic to investigate a piano — in Carnby’s case, to obtain it for an antique dealer, and in Emily’s case to try and search for her uncle’s suicide note. Upon making it to the attic, however, they’re placed under siege by monsters, and, afterwards, soon find Hartwood’s mansion cut off from the outside world, and beset with the undead. Now whichever player character you chose must now do their best to scavenge and explore the mansion, avoiding creatures and solving puzzles in order to access new areas, both in hopes of finding a way out, and in hopes of finding out what exactly is haunting the Hartwood mansion.

And for an early work in the genre — and for something that… didn’t quite possess the benefit of knowing where previous survival horror games succeeded and failed — it’s pretty solid. I like the way this game approaches level design. The mansion is large, sprawling, and above all else, open: it’s up to the player to find out what they can access and what they can’t, and through that, what the player needs to do to open up new areas. It creates a nice feedback loop, where by opening up a new area you’re rewarded with the means to open up new areas. The game carries some fairly disparate influences — specifically, the works of H.P Lovecraft, George A. Romero, and Dario Argento — but manages to blend them all together in a way that feels not only seamless, but to the point where the game really feels more like its own thing than it does any of said predecessors. Furthermore, while it… does feel a bit weird to talk about how something being jank actually works for a game’s benefit as if that’s just a core expectation of a survival horror game, there are moments where the limitations of the time manage to enhance the experience. Any point where I had to run away or something, or carefully navigate around traps or enemies, I felt the controls added a little degree of added stress and adrenaline to the equation, and made those parts of the game feel more standout.

Tragically, I do think that other than in that example, the conceits of the time… manifest more as downsides than things that boost the experience. Combat is bad. Instead of just using a weapon, there’s a whole system with equipped weapons where you choose which hand to use and/or which direction to swing. What it intends is a system a bit reminiscent of real-life sword-fighting, where where and when you swing is key to interrupting your enemy and landing a strike. How it works in practice is that you’re beholden to this clunky system where you have to wind your strike up before you can swing, and meanwhile the enemy can attack quickly enough to interrupt your animation before you're ever allowed to attack. Thus, it’s oftentimes a much better idea to avoid combat unless you can actively avoid it — not because of any sense of resource management, or cost vs. gain, but because if you try it’s more likely the enemy is going to stunlock you for half your health before you can even actually land a hit on them. While I do like the contrast in how the last third of the game is much more linear and straightforward than the rest of the mansion, I enjoyed much less how the game became the very first a 3D platformer: the clunky jump controls, the camera angles the game chooses, and the steep price for falling into the water definitely made that whole endgame section kind of a slog. It also, coincidentally, throws a bunch of enemy encounters that you can’t really run away from, so the previous issues combined with getting constantly stunlocked by enemies definitely left… a rather low mark on my experience.

Still, though, even if it does feel a little obsolete compared to the games that more directly kickstarted/defined the genre, and even if I certainly had my frustrations going through the game, I do think this is still a game definitely worth experiencing, presuming you want to. Whether it’s because you want to see what inspired the original Resident Evil, or whether you want to play the game on its own terms, it’s absolutely worth taking a look. It’s much closer to its progeny than you might think. 6/10.

INSIDE (2016):

Developed by: Playdead
Original Position: 16/46
Played Before? No.

INSIDE starts with you playing as a small child running through a forest, pursued by gunmen, vans, and guard dogs. His flight takes him through several different areas — a farm, a steelworks, and a dilapidated city — and as the player platforms and solves puzzles to get through each area, they eventually find themselves delving into a research institute, which is, seemingly, the source of everything that’s happening. It’s difficult to really talk about the plot of INSIDE. Not because of any major spoilers (though, admittedly, there’s a pretty big one) more so because… the plot is your interpretation of it. Not necessarily just in terms of thematic content — though that’s a big part — you loosely have to intuit what’s going on around you, and then… bring your own perspective into it. Figure out your own meaning out of the puzzle pieces laid out in front of you.

Of course, it’s very easy for this particular approach to fall flat. For something, say, to make an attempt at looking evocative, or “artsy,” but for that to be a front for a work that turns out to be more vacuous in nature. That’s subjective, of course, and dependent on the thoughts and tastes of whatever given audience member is the one staring at the painting. I, personally, am of the viewpoint (or, well, the uni teachings) that everything has something behind the surface, however intended by the author, however much you need to squint your eyes to see it. It’s not a viewpoint I exercise often. As somebody who’d say he’s… more of a creative than he really is a critic, oftentimes when I look at a piece of media I pick more at the skull than I do the brain: my focus is on the construction of a work, what specific choices the author made and how that could be applied to my own creative pursuits. It usually takes a work (or something outside of it) specifically prompting me to delve into the thematic side of the equation. INSIDE is a game that asks the player to look at it with that sort of lens. And, luckily for it, I think it succeeds on that front.

What helps, though, is that even if it didn’t, it’s still a pretty solid puzzle platformer on its own. It’s a bit more of the former than the latter, in that making forward progress is more about figuring out what to do over executing it, and I think that’s a formula that works. When you’re at a wall, or a chokepoint, all the pieces you need to make it past are right in front of you, and it’s mostly a matter of figuring out what the pieces are and where to place them. There are some really neat sequences — like the whole level taking place in the mines: how the whole area feels like one single giant puzzle that you slowly start to solve the more and more you gather the things you need — and some moments where you have to think outside the box to figure out your way past an obstacle. The artstyle is impressive, too: I love the use of 3D backgrounds and models for what is functionally a 2D sidescroller, and I’m a fan of how the game makes work of darker more muted colours like blacks and greys to still paint rather vivid and pretty landscapes. Most of all…

I really love the animation work. The way movement is depicted works to detail a lot of little things that help characterize the experience. Your character runs with a gait that… isn’t remotely smooth: there’s way too much needless extra movement and expenditure of energy whenever he runs. He flails and has his body completely taken by the air whenever he falls. He buckles when he hits the ground, and it takes a second for him to truly get back on his feet again. These aren’t the movements of anybody who has… any sort of finesse or knowledge on how to properly run and jump: this is a scared kid, on the run, up against a world that is all too happy to kill him on sight. Speaking of, the death animations feel genuinely brutal: the way you can see your blood splattering on the ground when the dogs rip your throat out, how everything becomes a mess of limbs and hair when a certain underwater creature grabs you, or how when you fall from too high you think, for a moment, that you’re right about to get back up, and then you don’t. Not to mention basically… a lot of the stuff that happens during the final act of the game, which looks and feels so gross not just by what’s in front of you, but through some of the little ways in which things move around there. In general, I really like the way things move in this game: it works both to characterize the situation and makes it feel a good bit more evocative.

I do think the experience could’ve been a bit more concise? It’s perhaps an odd complaint, given that the game’s only roughly 3.5 hours long, but I felt like you could maybe shave 30-45 minutes off that and have… a bit of a more focused experience. Some of the sections, I felt, felt… maybe extraneous: parts where it felt like the game was retreading old ground, or otherwise not really going anywhere new. I think maybe the road to the final act could’ve also been shorter: there’s a point where you think that it’s going to transition to the climax but then it keeps going for a good while longer before you reach it. While puzzles are mostly fairly intuitive, sometimes executing what you need to do feels a bit more tight than it should. This gets a bit rougher near the end, where oftentimes it seems like you know what you need to do… only for there to actually be an extra step involved, and sometimes it feels less like you’re missing one of the pieces and more like you’re just not doing it right.

But aside from those quibbles, I enjoyed my time with INSIDE. It’s a solid sidescroller that gives you challenges on multiple fronts — both in terms of the puzzles you need to solve to progress, and the work you kind of have to put in to understand what’s going on. I wouldn’t necessarily place it close to a game I super enjoyed, or anything: the length really does kill it, a little, and even then sometimes there’s only really so much an artsy platformer can really do to get more than a

/10 from me, but I liked this, it left an impression on me, and I think, maybe, this'll be something that I'll keep thinking about a good bit down the line. 7/10.

The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

Re: The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread